I’ve Set Up Customer Payments To Automatically Take a Deposit at the Point of Booking But it’s Not Working

The main thing to note with the ‘Customer Payments’ section is that it is a rule for auto-confirm bookings only. You can send an authentication request (and a payment request if you have the Collins Pay bolt-on) to any booking/enquiry manually; to do this, please see this article. You can however, authenticate the customer's card at the point of booking to be able to bill them for no show or late cancellation. To do this, make sure you have set up the auto-confirm rules correctly by adding the correct days of the week you would like auto-confirm to be activated (in ‘Auto-confirm Rules’) and that you’ve added all the applicable tables (in ‘Areas for this booking type’).

In the ‘Customer Payments’ section, click ‘Add A Deposit’ and fill out each individual field the with appropriate details. If you do not fill out the 'Date' or 'Time' fields, Collins will assume that these apply every day at all times.

Important - You need to fill out the duration (rather than leave this blank) otherwise the system will not automatically assume a time and therefore not take any payment from the customer. If this applies to all bookings, simply select 'None' to 12h0m.

Make sure the parameters for the number of guests correlate with amount of guests in the auto-confirm rules section. For example, if you have set your auto-confirm max to 12 people, you will not be able to authenticate automatically for a group of say 15 people (see screenshot below.) In this case, it would come through as an enquiry instead and an authentication will have to be sent manually.

To add another set of authentication rules (maybe you would like to authenticate a higher amount for larger groups) simply click ‘Add A Deposit’. When adding another payment option, make sure the parameters do not overlap with the previous set of rules.